Politify all the things
But why is this political? Why is it right v left? Why is it Republicans v Democrats?
It’s not political, it’s technical. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Either the vaccine protects against the virus or it doesn’t. General vaccination either slows the pandemic or it doesn’t. The vaccine is either safe or not. Those are not political questions. Nobody wants to get the virus, so why is anyone making the issue political?
Is it just because “fuck you, that’s why”? Because it’s so urgent to be An Individual that people are willing to get a horrible disease to make their point?
Take-home question: Would Ayn Rand have gotten the vaccination?
So, really, what does Fox and Company suggest is the alternative for people under 30? To get sick and spread the variant because it ain’t nobody’s business by their own?
Back in March 2020, there were articles about “COVID parties”, where young people did want to actively contract the virus, so that they could infect older people so that the older people would die. I don’t know how common this was.
I expect she would have, actually, since although it benefits others it can be done to just ensure you yourself won’t get the virus, in the spirit of selfishness she so liked.
Everything is so overpoliticized, and all it does is confuse things. Do the antivaxxers really need to claim political reasons, or are there plenty of other more relevant motivations, like say, ignorance for one?
Ignorance is a good motivator after all, and I’ll prove it. Here, hold my beer… :P
The Republicans since the 1970s have been tightly allied with religious fundamentalism which eventually became the dominant strain in the party. Religion is all about clinging to chosen beliefs regardless of how much evidence is against them (as with creationism vs evolution, for example). Once that mind-set is entrenched for matters of religious dogma specifically, and becomes party of one’s standard way of thinking, it easily broadens to encompass other areas like global-warming denialism or, in this case, covid-19 and vaccines. The infallible source of revelation (Trump this time, not the Bible, but the thinking works the same) said that covid-19 is trivial, so all evidence to the contrary must be ignored and anyone who points it out must be demonized.
It’s not exactly that science is being politicized, it’s that right-wing politics in the US has become religionized, and religion has been at war with science since Roman times.
What they want is tribal war (A.K.A. culture war). To have a war you need two sides. To have two sides you need something that can make people hate each other, or–at least–make one side hate the other.
In the past, racial, ethnic or religious differences often served this purpose. If Fox News used those issues today, they would get push-back, so they are going with other things, like vaccines.
@GW #2 Wasn’t the idea to develop immunity? Like some parties that anti-vaxxers had.
Rand absolutely would’ve gotten vaccinated, at a free vaccine event, since she had no trouble tapping the social services net for her own medical care (though she attempted to do it under a pseudonym).
Re Rand:
In a group chat at a virtual conference in May I encountered someone who claimed that she was not going to get vaccinated because, living “down the street from Moderna”, she had observed that “most Moderna employees” were refusing to get the vaccine because they considered it too risky. She did believe that the vaccine was effective, but did not want to risk getting it herself, emphasizing that it was only released for emergency use, which meant that it was “unapproved” and “experimental”. She went on to say that she was convinced that she herself would be well-protected by herd immunity from all the (less careful) people who were rushing ahead to get vaccinated. When several people pointed out that her approach was selfish, her response was that this was as it should be – as a libertarian, she considered that for her to be selfish was a Good Thing. (I have to say, this was the first time that I have heard a libertarian say this so overtly and bluntly.)
Freemage: Just like the Covid-Denier-in-Chief. Or many of the Republican bigwigs, for that matter. They jumped at vaccination opportunities.
Big Cheeto declared that 2+2=5
Fifty years from now Fox, or its descendants will still say so.
And the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
And Germany didn’t really lose in 1918.
And Alger Hiss was innocent.
And the Shoah didn’t happen.
Each has its own cult. And they appear to be impervious to truth.